quick hive death

[patrickp]

Hey everyone.  I just started beekeeping this spring and have gotten 3 hives.  One was from a package, two others from cut-outs.  I've been reading this forum for several months and learning from local guys, but now I've got a weird problem.

One of my cutouts hasn't been doing great, but they filled one brood box and I gave them a second to work on.  There were some honey stores and the queen seemed to be laying ok.  I went about 3 weeks without checking them (went to college) and when I went back Friday, nearly all the bees were dead.  My parents looked at the hive fronts every few days to see if anything unusual was happening while I was gone, but they didn't notice anything.  When I looked inside, I found just a little capped brood, only a handful of bees, and no honey.  There's a strong hive about 5 feet away that is still doing well.  Any ideas on what happened?

Thanks for the help!


Pat

[Michael Bush]

There are many possibilities.  The queen could have failed and the replacement got hit by a car or eaten by a dragonfly.  They could have had a brood disease that caused them to dwindle (look for mummies, scale etc. to check for sac brood, foulbrood or chaulkbrood).  They could have gotten robbed out by the hive next door or even some other hive.  They could have gotten a bad infestation of Varroa mites followed by viruses.

Are there any stores?  Are the cappings ragged from robbers?  Are there a lot of dead Varroa on the bottom board?  Are there a lot of bees with deformed wings?

[Brian D. Bray]

If it was a cutout, they could just have absconded.

[patrickp]

I did see a queen when I looked into the hive.  There were some larva that were in the piles of dead bees, but I didn't find a lot of mites.  The cappings didn't look like they were too ragged, but I'd have to look again to be sure.